Rilke & Page 666 in my text ;-)

[Robin Landseadel]

This is a really interesting post, one that I'll re-read. Your  
information on the specifics of the symbolism is quite welcome. Time  
to put on that lead coat.

Alice should be aware that though I think that Pynchon, for whatever  
reason, is cognizant of and interested in such things as Wiccan  
Lesbians and other Faeries he is also skeptical and rational. Whatever  
he may or may not be, Magicke is a topick that he attends to, more  
than most writers I'm acquainted with.

And Gnosticism's not the only Heresy he's into.

On Oct 24, 2010, at 7:59 AM, alice wellintown wrote:

> see "Deviations." page 319
>
> Sexual relations in GR are not so much an expression of
> human desire, as symbolic of the attempt to transcend the cycle of
> life and death ( Earth's
> Natural realm) through violent sado-masochistic acts and other
> "deviations" or anti-fertile SUICIDE.
>
> Japan is the best current example of this pathology, one Pynchon never
> stops writing about. In fact, while some read his VL, as Robin does,
> as some kinda Feminist Awakening to a Rainbow world where sexuality is
> orientated far to the Left of Pynchon's confession in SL Introduction,
> this kind of reading is not only a mis-reading of the author's
> attitude, which has not changed that much, his tone, but also, because
> it is obvious, very obvious that the author has been concerned about
> sexual repression and its impact on culture since his Farina days, but
> to skew him to the Left of Wica Lesbians and Village queers is to miss
> the point.  The pathology in Japan, akin to the Oedipal struggles and
> the Sick Dynamo Mothers of GR, is an idea young Pynchon developed, in
> part, from Orwell's 1984. So, China, in some respects, a cult Sold on
> Suicide, though India too has been slaughtering its females, is,
> because it is a totalitatian fascist state, whereas, America, not
> Amerika, is a democratic one that has spilled its fecundity and broken
> its promises.
>
> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120696816
>
>
> So if you read the list of "sexual acts" (318-19) and
> consider several of the most important themes and metaphors
> and ideas and symbolisms-- color for example,  white
> and black, the male sperm is white, white being the
> color of the Rocket and  Man's attempts
> to dominate natural cycles and so on. This white seed  flows
> into black feces, the color of the repressed,
> and this causes a poisoning (Angel and Rilke), a
> poisoned manure. A poisoning, we are told at several  points
> in the novel, that is Angelic--the Angel from Rilke to GR is
> the anti-Holy Ghost, the present dispensation (a religious
> term) , and remember that fathers carry
> the poison, the sickness, be it Christian or in Freudian
> terms the Oedipal situation in the Zone.
>
> Also ("once only" for example, and "sold on suicide," "the empty  
> ones"...this
> is in fact what is happening in the sewer, Benny's contract
> with the alligators, destroyer and destroyed in V. and so
> on, it's a religious bond).
>
> Again, I think it is not a matter of anal intercourse being
> "death orientated" and "sterile," (although this is its symbolic
> function in GR.
>
> It is one act of many, and the sexual "Deviations" serve larger  
> themes,
> in fact, sex in all of Pynchon's fiction functions as such.
>
> In any event, P's novels, the themes of his fiction include
> a gnosticizing, the "Neo-Platonic Nature". So, for example,
> the conviction that the material universe and its God are
> evil,  that temporality is slavery; that salvation, being contingent
> cannot be sought; that
> humans are now forced to lead an inauthentic life in a treacherous
> dream world, or nightmare,  like the "Oneirine
> hauntings"(GR 703) or the reference to the "Dark Dream" (GR
> 697) suggest; that by despising such a world they experience
> an existential estrangement (GR 660) and the
> "bitterest of freedoms" (GR 704); finally, that they suffer
> a self-destructive licentiousness, as in the moral
> deviations through which the Hereros attempt to commit
> racial suicide (GR 319).
>
>
>
> From the Gnostic perspective in P's fiction,
> moral laws are "Their" laws, the product of a conspiracy
> against Man & Life, so human beings are free to ignore them and may
> even violate them rebelliously.
>
> In fact, the case with a rebellious character like Blicero is much the
> same as that
> of Melville's Ahab whose mad rantings, as many a Melville
> scholar has argued,  only become intelligible when seen from
> a Gnostic perspective, but as the white whale is almost like
> a Rocket, think about how it is different, Blicero is a
> different Ahab altogether.
>
> See Thomas Vargish, "Gnostic Mythos in Moby-Dick," PMLA 81,
> No.3 (June 1966) , pp. 272-77.
>
> And the other essay, the Rocket and the Whale, but I'll have
> to look up the citation.